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- [00:00]
iHeart Podcast Announcer
This is an iHeart podcast.
- [00:05]
Anabe Sofas Advertiser
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- [01:05]
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- [01:36]
Sarah (AM PM Breakfast Advertiser)
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- [01:53]
AM PM Breakfast Advertiser
Soggy Break up with bland breakfast and.
- [01:56]
Kevin Zinger
Taste AM PM's bacon, egg and cheese.
- [01:57]
AM PM Breakfast Advertiser
Biscuit made with cage free eggs, smoked bacon and melty cheese on a buttery biscuit. Am P M Too much good stuff.
- [02:11]
Newt Gingrich
On this episode of newts world. On February 20th, my grandson Robert and I were in Los Angeles and we had the pleasure of visiting the Divergent Technologies factory in Torrance, California. I was so impressed by the manufacturing innovation we saw on that tour, I wanted to share the story of Divergent with you. So I'm really pleased to welcome my guest, Kevin Zinger, Founder and Executive Chairman of Divergent Technologies and Singer Vehicles, the original equipment manufacturer of the world's fastest street legal hypercar, the 21C. Kevin, welcome and thank you for joining me on New School.
- [03:00]
Kevin Zinger
Well, it's my honor to be on your podcast, Mr. Speaker. And we as a team really enjoyed hosting you and Robert, So thank you for the opportunity and I should say.
- [03:11]
Newt Gingrich
For the full exposure to our audience that upon leaving you, we promptly went to In N Out Burger and my grandson was able to have animal fries. So I felt that the entire trip was both culturally and intellectually very exciting.
- [03:25]
Kevin Zinger
The only thing better would have been going to the drive in part of In N out burger with 21C.
- [03:31]
Newt Gingrich
That's true. I don't think I'm quite ready yet, although it's an amazing car, which we'll get to. But I want to start out with you because, you know, what you've achieved is amazing, but frankly, you're kind of really remarkable. I mean, you grew up in working class Ohio. You built hot rods along with your brothers. You got a football scholarship to Yale, ended up being an all American, and then you chose to join the United States Marine Corps Reserves. You've really had a remarkable life before you got into manufacturing. What motivated you through all that experience?
- [04:04]
Kevin Zinger
I think that each of these things had its own unique motivation. But in general, I was the youngest of five in a working class family and the first to go to college. And I ended up, because Ohio is a football crazy place and the Catholic schools are really the football powerhouses in Ohio. I ended up going to a very good Jesuit high school. And in that Jesuit high school, they taught the classical virtues. One of which is the life well lived is finding an area of competition that allows you to express your talents and stretch your talents in the greatest possible way. And that idea of the classical Greek, well lived, taught by Jesuit priests of all things, has always stayed in my head as apart from your spiritual life, the driver of how you use the gifts that you've been God given, in my view, to their fullest extent.
- [05:18]
Newt Gingrich
When you went to Yale, I was reading up on this, and your coach, who himself is in the football hall of Fame, said that you were the outstanding player he ever coached. And that part of it was your intensity, your commitment. What do you think made you so effective on the football field?
- [05:38]
Kevin Zinger
Well, you're given this gift of life. You have a short period to use it to the full extent. And I always trained to the max. And part of that training was to kind of figure out what you thought your limit was and push behind that. And I think when you approach life that way, you're not mentally prepared to lose. And so that would happen again and Again, I give you one instance. You know, we were playing in a game where it was actually nationally televised. It was the ABC game of the week. Keith Jackson was commentating, and I had. In this game, the score was 12 to 7. We were losing. There were only a few minutes left in the game. I had already blocked two punts. The one blocked punt I had, and I played defense, resulted in a touchdown. And the time was running out in the game. It was fourth down, the other side was about to punt, and my coach pulled me over and said, stop fooling around. You have to block this punt. And obviously I blocked two punts already in this game. So people were keying in on me. And I think you just at that moment, you're like this person who is a great person, hall of Fame coach believes in me. I will find a way. And so basically what I did is I lined up on one side of the ball, and as they got down, they of course wanted to make sure I didn't block the punt. So they moved their blocking coverage over to the one side, then I moved over to the other side and basically ran straight to the punter, blocked the punt, recovered it on the one yard line, and we ended up winning, 13 to 12. So I think those things are really just a matter of believing in yourself and feeding off of the belief of others in you and respecting that belief.
- [07:48]
Newt Gingrich
Then you went on at Yale to Yale Law School.
- [07:53]
Kevin Zinger
Yes. So, you know, originally I was thinking of getting, after I graduated from school, an MD, PhD. And then having worked in a lab, I decided not to do that. And I met a person who was later the dean of Yale Law School, Guido Calabresi. And we actually went to the same church in New Haven, St. Thomas More, which is a Catholic church. And he said, what are you doing? I explained to him, and he was a football fan, that I had been working in the Yale Med School lab and I had decided I didn't want to get an MD, PhD. And he said, why don't you come to Yale Law School? And I'm like, I don't know anything about law. And he said, kevin, and this is the first time I heard of this school. He said, no, Yale Law School is the L' cole Normale Superior of America. And I said, well, what do you mean? Like in France, that's where they send people who are thinkers, who find their own way to lead in some way in France. And here at Yale Law School, which at the time only had about 125 students in each entering class, he said, There were only four required courses at the time, and they were all pass fail. And they said, you want to study science, you want to study philosophy, you can study anything after those four courses. And so I thought, well, terrific. And then I went to Yale Law School.
- [09:17]
Newt Gingrich
Our mutual friend John Thornton tells the story that he went on to become a lawyer and that they got this call one day that one of the great defense attorneys in New York called and said, this young guy just beat me in court, and I can't believe how really, really smart he is. He said, you guys at Goldman Sachs ought to grab him. And so you leave Yale Law School and you become a deputy U.S. attorney.
- [09:45]
Kevin Zinger
Well, what happened was I left law school. I had been an editor of the Yale Law Journal. It's like being on the Law Review. And at that time, kind of the usual sequence. And I didn't want to become an academic. But my mentor, Guido Calabrese, who at that point was the dean of Yale's law School, said, there's a judge who's been assigned the Iran Contra cases, and he's looking for a clerk. He only takes one clerk a year. His name was Gerhard Gesell. He's a District of Columbia U.S. district Court judge. And so I went to work for him for a year. I got a top Secret clearance, all of the sensitive compartmented information clearances. As somebody from a working class family, this was incredibly interesting. And I got to work with this judge for a year on this case. And basically what happened was that at that point, I was actually thinking of going into business or doing something other than law. And the judge said to me, even if you go and do business as you said you want to do, being a trial lawyer will teach you a lot. And I said, judge, I'm one year out of law school. How do you become a trial lawyer? And I remember he picked up the phone and called up Rudy Giuliani, who was at the time the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, and said, rudy, I've got this guy. You've got to hire him. And I remember it was around noon, he said, I'm sending him up on the train from D.C. to New York. And Rudy hired me. And over the course of three years, in all of the cases that I had, I won top count convictions, including against some of the top lawyers. And then that's when that call took place to John Thornton.
- [11:38]
Newt Gingrich
So you then end up going over to Goldman Sachs, which is a totally different career.
- [11:44]
Kevin Zinger
It is. And I ended up working directly for John Thornton and I'd say at the time. And he was really progressed to running the international operations of Goldman Sachs. And I was really his point execution person and person that anything that he needed really to get done from a deal standpoint, everything from the merger between BSkyB and Sky Television into Sky in the UK to representing Likha Singh and the sale of Star Television, all a wide variety of different transactions and setting up offices and things. And so over the course of five years working with John, I learned a tremendous amount and was able to interact with people directly like a Rupert Murdoch on transactions.
- [12:39]
Newt Gingrich
John says that he told you when he offered you the job that you'd last about five years because it just wouldn't be dynamic enough for you that you'd ultimately want to go do something more that was under your control. So at the end of five years, this is after all one of the two or three greatest investment firms in the world. What led you to then leave Goldman Sachs?
- [13:02]
Kevin Zinger
I remember I was in Kowloon, it was late at night. Rupert Murdoch had summoned me to talk about a transaction that he was on the other side of. And he was there with the lawyer that he had. And I remember we had this long conversation, it was late at night and we were just talking in general. And I remember him saying, these businesses aren't life and death to me, it's much more important than that. And then I started talking to him about being an entrepreneur and he's like, why are you doing this? And I thought, what do you mean? I met Goldman Sachs. It's like, no, someone like you really should be creating something. And I thought, okay. I thought more and more and more. And that led me.
- [13:49]
Newt Gingrich
So you then decide to co found Coda Automotive, which is an electric vehicle manufacturer. This is about 2008. But that becomes for you a real evolutionary process from where you first thought about it. As you got into it, you really began looking at the whole notion of what is a sustainable production system, not just what is a sustainable fuel. Talk about that problem. I think it's a very interesting evolution and very important.
- [14:17]
Kevin Zinger
I learned a couple of very big lessons which resulted in me founding Divergent Technologies. One of the lessons was, I would say around kind of 2007, 2008, we were focused on building an affordable EV, but the first thing we looked at was battery cells. And I'd say we were the first to work with and generate with a battery company a large format prismatic lithium iron phosphate cell. That is the cell that China has scaled up with that company. Originally I tried to build the battery factory in Ohio. And because the US at that time, and I would say during the Obama administration, Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke, they were all, hey, if you can't build in the U.S. you know, China is our partner, you should build this factory in China. That factory was set up and if you look on YouTube and you put in Coda and Gary Locke and Kevin Zinger, you'll see it's about a two minute video of me giving a tour of that factory that gave China what I think was the decisive edge in scaling up battery production. That is what CATL licensed and scaled up that battery cell technology. When I was doing that as it relates to China, I looked at the CO2 emissions that related to manufacturing in China. And as you know, China uses dedicated coal power for manufacturing. When you manufacture a battery cell using coal fired power, which is what is used in China, the emissions from that are greater, I'd say for the average, say a 90 kilowatt hour battery pack in a car, you're generating over 200 kilograms of CO2 emitted per kilowatt hour. That manufacturing is greater than say, driving a Toyota Camry with all of its manufacturing emissions plus 80,000 miles of driving. And when I realized that, I realized that how you manufacture something and how you look at extraction, processing, manufacturing, then the actual use of fuel or electricity and then disposal. That life cycle assessment, which this analysis has also been done by Goldman Sachs in a very good report called Electric Vehicles Enter the Life Cycle Assessment Era, that kind of uncovers whether these vehicles are environmentally friendly or not. And a lot of it has to do with where you manufacture that battery cell and what the power source is. I'll stop there. I can then tell how that informed the next company that I started.
- [17:25]
Newt Gingrich
This is the evolution, although I want to take a brief detour because in the middle of all this, you're also in the Marine Corps. I mean, how did that fit in?
- [17:33]
Kevin Zinger
Well, I don't want to test the patience of your listeners, but what happened is in between my deciding to go to Yale Law School and entering Yale Law School, I had some time. And my older brother during the Vietnam War served in the Army. Both my parents served in World War II as enlisted service people in the Army Air Corps, which was the predecessor to the Air Force, and educated as I was by Jesuit High School and Men for Others, and one of the books that I read in high school was a book by William Manchester called Goodbye Darkness about his service in the Marine Corps as an enlisted Marine during World War II. And my parents never really talked about the war. My brother didn't either. But I thought as a citizen this is something where I've gotten these benefits where I should do some service. And so I enlisted in the Marine Corps Reserves and went through Parris Island Boot Camp Camp Lejeune for advanced infantry training. And then because I was being assigned to a special operations unit out of Quonset Point Naval Air Station in Rhode Island, I had to go through jump school at what at the time was called Fort Benning, Georgia.
- [18:54]
Newt Gingrich
You're clearly a guy who fills up every day with something.
- [19:08]
Anabe Sofas Advertiser
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- [20:08]
iHeart Podcast Announcer
Run a business and not thinking about podcasting? Think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ad supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, iHeart's twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers are into true crime, sports, comedy, culture, they'll hear your message. Plus, only iHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. And all this reach means everything. Just think about the universal marketing formula. The number of consumers who hear your message times the response rate equals the results. Now let's get those results growing for you. Think podcasting can help your business? Think iHeart streaming radio and podcasting. Let us show you at iheartadvertising.com that's iheartadvertising.com or call 844-844 iHeart. One more time, call 844-844 iHEART and get podcasting working for you.
- [21:14]
Newt Gingrich
So now we're back to the real breakthrough which is the focus on processes. And I have to say, having visited Divergent someday, you're gonna have to set up an entire tour service to be able. You're gonna have so many people want to come see this, because when you see it and you realize how you have integrated artificial intelligence with 3D printing, with robotics with very sophisticated use of materials, this is the factory of the future today. I mean, you have leapfrogged over virtually every potential competitive system. Did that just come to you or how did you put all of that together?
- [21:53]
Kevin Zinger
I mean, what happened was with the automotive and battery company, I had been living in the Bay Area, so in the Silicon Valley area. And I had had interaction and had a couple of discussions with Andy Grove after he had retired from being chairman CEO of Intel. And I'd say we both shared. I told him about my frustration with the inability of finding capital to build a factory in the United States. And we also looked and said, hey, and this feeds into obviously a focus and passion of President Trump and both his administrations from a trade policy standpoint and from a funding standpoint. We were looking at Silicon Valley and if you had some hardware aspect to your tech startup, unless it said, and by the way, we're going to outsource manufacturing to China, you didn't get funded. And we saw things because of these trade policies, because of the nature of that type of capital. We were, for example, having an Apple transfer process manufacturing IP like critical Advanced manufacturing IP over to China, and companies like Foxconn start to build a next generation of manufacturing ahead of the United States, as well as move manufacturing capacity over to China. In the 80s, I think must have come out in the late 80s, that book by Paul Kennedy, the Rise and Decline of Great Powers. It was clear to me that no leading power maintains that position if its industrial capacity is less than its peer competitors. Today we're in a. Elon Musk talks about fork in the road. I mean, we're in a manufacturing fork in the road. More than anything else. We're in an existential fork in the road. China in 2000 had 7% of global manufacturing market share. It's now trending toward 45%. The US had 25%. It's now trending toward 11%. The US plus all of its allies have not only less overall industrial manufacturing capacity than China, they have less advanced manufacturing. That is unsustainable. I looked at that at a slightly earlier point and said all of the things that I know about machine learning, automation, manufacturing, if you were going to start with a clean sheet of paper and re industrialize the US because at that time I said we will lose our position as a leading nation state if we do not re industrialize. But we can't go back to what we were doing before. We can't go back to the way things are or were before we offshored our manufacturing. We need to make a leapfrog, the kind of leapfrog say JFK made when he brought in Wernher von Braun, the rocket scientist, and said, how do we catch up to the Soviets? And Werner von Braun said, you will never catch up to the Soviets by going to Earth orbit. You need to go to lunar orbit and develop the technology to do that. Right. And that in turn obviously created semiconductor industry, many different things. I simply said you can't do Industry 4.0. You can't do what Foxconn and Apple have done with CNC machining and automation. You need to completely leapfrog that with a total digital system. And if you're starting a company, the first thing you ask is, what's the biggest problem you can solve? And I looked at things like car companies, which obviously go through these peaks and valleys which we saw in 2008, nine because their factories are design specific. Huge amount of capital goes into designing a single model type, both for the vehicle and then the factory. Right. So design specificity. And so I said, okay, what happens if you solve that problem at a given price point by creating a fully digital system? Machine learning generates a structure. That structure then gets printed with fidelity the way that it's printed. It gets printed in assemblable blocks and then an automated system assembles those. And that's a super simplified version of what we're doing. But that in turn allows you, in a non design specific way to design any kind of structure for air, land, sea and space vehicles. Generate that structure, have it be a far better, lighter, better performing structure, be able to print it off the same equipment, and then be able to assemble it off the same equipment. Whether it's an Aston Martin Vantage frame or a Lockheed Martin cruise missile system. You can design, print, assemble both of those back to back as you develop this.
- [27:27]
Newt Gingrich
The Divergent factory isaw, if I understand the story correctly, is the result of 11 years of evolution in which now Divergent has 520 patents and your son Lucas, who's a great story in his own right, has 50 of them. So you guys have been methodically solving problems one step at a time and just gradually building this system, if you will, until now. It is, I think, unmatched by anything else in the world.
- [27:57]
Kevin Zinger
What I'd say is not Meaning to correct you, but we have about 750 patents today. I'm the lead inventor with about 200 and I think 222 at last count. Lucas has around 80 now. He's my son and partner in the business. What I'd say is about three years ago or four years ago, we had the first version of the factory that could be commercialized. And since that time, this has gone into production. So automotive, which obviously you're doing the safety, performance structures for passenger cars, right? This is enormous risk if you're not manufacturing properly those structures for those vehicles we brought in as customers. For example, we're shipping frames to Aston Martin for a variant of the Aston Martin Vantage today. But Aston Martin Bugatti, an Italian company I can't name, McLaren, Mercedes, AMG, and a German company I can't name, those are all production customers. So we actually proved three years ago this system was fully commercial and are now shipping structures and on production programs with six major automotive brands. Obviously, the system is an adaptive system. So we take all of that data generated by the system, and the system is version the software and hardware. But what you saw is now a factory that is ready to scale and which we want to take from that initial factory to tens and then hundreds of factories. So literally every single state in the United States could have multiple digital factories across the country.
- [29:51]
Newt Gingrich
Now, if I could just take a minute to stay with the Czinger cars, because as I understand it, when you approach the big auto companies, they were too slow and too timid, and so you just decided you'd build a car to show them that it could be done. And I have to say, I was out in your car factory, and it's pretty breathtaking. I mean, these are amazing cars. Can you talk just for a minute about the whole notion of the zinger vehicle models and the way you've approached this? Because it's quite an amazing story.
- [30:21]
Kevin Zinger
So going back, probably if somebody looked, did a Google search, they would see. When I was a company of one, I bought one of these archaic commercial 3D printers and worked and built a first prototype car that was called the Blade. From there, we then used that as I hired people and started to scale as a laboratory, as a development platform. And about three and a half years ago, Lucas, my son and my partner, said, dad, this is how he really became. The two of us are kind of founders of the car company, which is owned by the tech company. He said, why don't we turn that platform into a car company? We can do it with Almost no capital because you're almost like an apple. You know how Apple is a fabless product design company, it uses others for that fabrication. We could use the tools of Divergent and the factory of Divergent to rapidly design the most advanced vehicle in the world. Take it through crash safety, take it through emissions, which we did in all 50 states, including California, and then take it to the track and show that it is faster than any production Ferrari, faster than any production McLaren, faster than any production Mercedes or Porsche. Meaning street legal car, which we did, we shattered the circuit of the Americas record in Austin, the Goodwood Hill climb record, the Laguna Seca record. Now that car in a factory, which was set up by Andy Lampert. Elan had hired him over a decade ago to set up manufacturing and production at SpaceX. And he ran that for about a decade. And he came over to us and he's now set up our production factory for the Czinger 21C. And as you saw, cars are now rolling off and being shipped to customers. And that is within a period of time that no auto company in the world could match. We designed, built and are shipping the most advanced, highest performing production car ever. And it's American made, it's off American patented technology. And this is, we call it the 21C after 21 century because this is like 21st century American muscle car.
- [32:44]
Newt Gingrich
And as I understand, produces something like 1650 horsepower and can go about 210 miles an hour. And it's street legal.
- [32:54]
Kevin Zinger
It's completely street legal. You know, it's been through full crash, full emissions. The car is about a 3,000 pound car. It's got 1350 horsepower, all wheel drive, two EV motors up front. Our own design V8. We designed and built our own V8, much of which is printed. The top speed of the aerobody car is 253 miles an hour. The car does 0 to 60 in 1.88 seconds. What I'd say the most impressive thing though is when you take the car to the track and like reference tracks, tracks that are the famous tracks, it way outperforms any production car ever built by any of the great European companies, whether it's a McLaren or a Ferrari or a Bugatti. It is in one very short period of time. You see that Ford versus Ferrari. This was Zinger versus the world. And the world was defeated.
- [33:58]
Anabe Sofas Advertiser
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- [34:59]
iHeart Podcast Announcer
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- [36:04]
Newt Gingrich
I really want our listeners to understand what you have built is a process system using the most advanced technology in the world and integrating it synergistically so that each of the breakthroughs reinforces the next breakthrough. But can you just walk us through a little bit of what happens and how is it done at the what you would call the divergent adaptive production system?
- [36:28]
Kevin Zinger
Sure. So the system has three subsystems. One is a machine learning based generative engineering engine. One is a printer that takes what that engineering engine generates and with fidelity in three dimensions prints that structure and then an assembly cell that takes those component structures and puts them together, say into a full vehicle structure, whether it's a large drone, a collaborative combat aircraft, or the chassis of the 21C. So how that works is say you have an Aston Martin or a Lockheed Martin. Let's take Lockheed, because a big focus of ours right now is aerospace and defense they may come to us and say, we've got a modular cruise missile system. Here are the requirements. Here are the engineering load cases, the stresses that it'll have when, say, it's something that is launched from under the wing of an airplane. Here are the loads when the plane is carrying that off a bomb release unit. Here are the stresses when it gets released. Here are the thermal requirements. Vibration, they give us those requirements. At that point, divergent takes over design authority. And really the machine takes over design authority in that we then take those requirements and we put those into the machine. The machine runs a simulation of the performance of a structure. It also runs concurrently the generation of manufacturing instructions and assembly instructions. It's called bidirectional evolutionary structures optimization. The machine is adding and subtracting material in a simulation until it creates a perfectly optimized structure, perfectly Pareto optimized structure. At that point, the machine has fully optimized the structure, both for its performance but also for its manufacturing and assembly. So say you're. I'll take an example. McLaren would ordinarily take six to nine months to do the design for a suspension component for their new Hypercar. This is all out in public domain that we're working with them. We replace that six to nine months and an engineering team with about 15 hours of compute time. And at the end of that 15 hours of compute time, they have a structure that's 20 to 40% lighter, stiffer, outperforms the structure, is lower cost. And that structure has its manufacturing and assembly instructions. And we can immediately manufacture and assemble. This is a machine for taking a design, minimizing material and energy in its building, maximizing its performance, lowering its cost, printing it off a machine that doesn't care whether it's printing for Aston Martin or Lockheed Martin, and then an assembly system that assembles the assemblable blocks, that doesn't care whether it's manufacturing or assembling for Aston Martin or Lockheed Martin. We in turn charge for that engineering and then we charge per piece for what we deliver to the customer.
- [39:48]
Newt Gingrich
You had actually done work for General Atomic, which produces the Predator, among other things, and which is a very, very sophisticated company. And they came back with results of your intervention that was so amazing and they're such a serious firm that it really sort of stopped me in my tracks and made me think about how big a breakthrough that this potentially is.
- [40:13]
Kevin Zinger
Yes. So two plus years ago, General Atomics reached out to us. They asked us to re engineer one of their smaller unmanned aerial systems. And we were able to in a very short period of time, reduce the part count by 98%. So things like fuel tanks, instead of being separate with brackets and attachments, they actually get printed into the structure. As an example. That's how we reduce 184 parts in that drone to four parts. So 184 to four 98% part reduction. We reduce the production cycle time from 12 days to less than a day. Like over 90% reduction in production cycle time. We reduce the per unit cost by over 40% and we reduce the development cost by over 50% the development time by about 95%, I'd say. More recently we have contracts with almost every single major U.S. defense prime and aerospace company. We were able to on a modular cruise missile system from the start of engineering to successful flight testing. It took 10 weeks. That 10 weeks would be compared to years in a normal process. As an example, General Atomics, after we did that, actually published the results in a press release immediately. We had almost every single major U.S. defense prime reach out to us. And that really kicked off our involvement in aerospace and defense.
- [41:52]
Newt Gingrich
Basically, if you think about the fact that you're universally applicable, what you do doesn't actually matter which particular product because you're taking the basic same approach. I saw a note that said that potentially on a worldwide basis, this is like a 5 trillion dollar market.
- [42:11]
Kevin Zinger
Yes, this company, I'd say we don't want to get ahead of our skis. We've got one factory. We do have six major auto brands doing this. I don't think any of them thought this would happen for another decade or more. We have almost every single major U.S. prime. I'd say for the U.S. on the defense side, our Achilles heel right now is inability to rapidly develop and then manufacture at volume. This system solves both of those problems today, is scalable today. And the same factory that is printing missiles and torpedoes and collaborative combat aircraft can also print for Aston Martin and Bugatti and McLaren and Mercedes off of the same equipment all at the same time. Or we can do replacement spare parts for defense aircraft, for jets, jet fighters, other things that need it. We can develop new weapons, we can re engineer old weapons. But this gives us, in my view, the only plausible real deterrent to China. And that is very rapid development of the new kind of weapons that people like Elon Musk and the Defense Department talk about. Unmanned air, land, sea and space vehicles. The ability to rapidly develop those and then immediately scale manufacturing in a distributed way. And also the ability, if you look at our Defense budget, which is over 800 billion, 300 billion of that is for sustainment replacement parts. These new machines can digitize those parts and as needed manufacture those parts. We're already doing things for the C130 right now, spare parts. That means that you could massively reduce those sustainment costs while massively increasing the readiness of aircraft. So I think there's a very, very, very good fit there. And as you said, that kind of designed agnostic equipment allows you to save money, create higher performance products and have the kind of volumes of missiles and other armaments and munitions that actually will deter China.
- [44:37]
Newt Gingrich
I think back to the book by the chief logistician in the first Iraq war who talked about moving mountains because the sheer volume of stuff we send forward, and as you saw in Afghanistan, the amount of stuff we leave behind in this model, you could imagine a specific divergent factory that moved into the field with the expeditionary force and provided real time manufacturing on site that could actually take virtually every spare part that they needed and simply do it digitally right there, cutting out all sorts of the logistics tail and also only producing what you need.
- [45:16]
Kevin Zinger
Exactly. Not keeping excess inventory. I think distributing out factories to different theaters certainly would functionally allow this system to do exactly what you're describing.
- [45:30]
Newt Gingrich
Mr. Speaker, one last question, which is you're really one of the most interesting and smartest people I've met in a long career of meeting a lot of interesting people. What keeps you up at night? What do you worry about the most?
- [45:45]
Kevin Zinger
Well, I have a concern and I also have optimism. My concern is, I'll say two years ago when I first did this with General Atomics, my view of the military industrial complex, or whatever you want to call it, the defense industrial base, how's that was one that comes from probably the first Gulf War, which is we just have overwhelming technology and capacity. I've now seen that that defense industrial base has suffered the way the rest of our commercial base has and even worse from moving our supply chain offshore. We don't have, and it's not a secret because almost every single congressional hearing, and we just testified recently in front of Senator Wicker and the rest of the Senate Armed Services Committee about this problem. We don't have the industrial base that is here to not only develop new weapons rapidly and then volume produce them, but even for our existing weapons, we don't have the casting suppliers onshore, we don't have this supply chain. And the reason I've focused so much now on on defense is I think we're at an Existential moment. This is the last best chance we have to leapfrog Chinese manufacturing technology and catch up with that manufacturing. And I think what you saw, respectfully, is that solution. So my fear is that will not be identified rapidly enough. People won't fully understand what you've seen. They can only really do it by spending enough time to do it. People will look and somebody says, oh, that's 3D printing. We are far more advanced than any 3D printing system commercially available. This is really a fully digital engineering and manufacturing system where all the software and hardware has been developed as a full system. It's moving from the typewriter to Mac desktop publishing in one step. And people have to really understand that, to see that. So my concern is about the adoption of that and the bureaucracy within the military that would look and say, oh, we don't understand this. Therefore, we have to put it through whatever long process we need to make sure that we smash it from a square peg into something round that we can stick into our round down hole. And it takes up time and loses the jump on the Chinese that we have right now. I'd say my optimism comes from the reason why President Trump's administration has tariffs is they want to bring manufacturing back to the United States. Right. We were a great country. I grew up, obviously parents of the greatest generation. I grew up in Cleveland. I'm 65 now. Where manufacturing you took pride in America, made things right. That's a lot of our dignity in the middle class came from that. We've lost that. The tariffs, for example, and trade policy that was to really rebuild that manufacturing. This is the solution to do it. So my optimism is that we have an administration that I think in a productively disruptive way, I hope through people like yourself, Mr. Speaker, who do come and see it, who do take the time to understand this is one of one in the world and is something that the United States needs to take from 1 to 100 to 1000. My optimism is that that can happen.
- [49:39]
Newt Gingrich
Well, my hope is that, and I think President Trump and Secretary Hegseth may be up to this. You know, In World War II, we went from a jump start, and it was astonishing how fast we ramped up. And I think that you were the first system I've seen which gives us the opportunity to ramp up in a similar kind of way and to once again leapfrog past all of our competitors in a way that just leaves them behind. So, Kevin, I want to thank you for joining me. I think of you. Not only is extraordinarily bright and hardworking, but a genuine patriot. Somebody who has spent most of your life developing a system which could in fact be the difference between survival and failure for the United States. And I want to let our listeners know that they can learn more about the groundbreaking work you're doing at Divergent Technologies by visiting your website at Divergent Technology. And if they like cars, they ought to check out the czinger vehicles@zinger.com and I just want to thank you for taking this time out of your extraordinarily busy schedule to help educate us.
- [50:50]
Kevin Zinger
Well, thank you and God bless you, Mr. Speaker, for all you do and for supporting us.
- [50:58]
Newt Gingrich
Thank you to my guest, Kevin Zinger. You can learn more about his company, Divergent Technologies on our show page@newtsworld.com Newtsworld is produced by Gingrich 360 and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is Garnesey Sloan. Our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The artwork for the show was created by Steve Penley. Special thanks to the team at Gingrich360. If you've been enjoying Newt's world, I hope you'll go to Apple Podcast and both Radis with five stars and give us a review so others can learn what it's all about. Right now, listeners of Newtsworld can sign up for my three free weekly columns at Gingrich360.com Newsletter I'm Newt Gingrich. This is Newts World.
- [51:57]
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